By Farrukh Abadi
Atlanta policing, and more specifically Cop City—a planned police training center in Atlanta that is projected to be the largest in the country—represent the unfolding political and economic trends of capitalism in the US today. They show the methods used by the capitalist class to maintain and expand its power while attempting to weaken the ability of the people to defend their interests. These trends encompass the inevitable worsening of conditions under capitalism that squeezes the majority of people across the world tighter each day—increased state repression, lower wages, more layoff s, increased inflation, the stripping away of basic rights, and countless other attacks. The parallel trend is that the people resist the growing repression in greater and greater waves. In Atlanta, too, the people are resisting.
Cop City: The Child of Capitalists, Politicians, and Police
The Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, dubbed as Cop City, is a planned $90 million, 85-acre space cut into a key Atlanta forest. According to their website, the training center will include a mock village with houses, convenience stores, hotels, etc.; a shooting range; a kennel; and a horse barn. Stop Cop City, one of the key organizations resisting the training center, adds that it will also include “military-grade training facilities, dozens of shooting ranges, and a Black Hawk helicopter landing pad.” It will act as a terror center against Black people in the heart of Atlanta.
Protests have been going on since the project was first announced to the public in the spring of 2021. Following the wake of the 2020 May Uprisings, Democrat Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms argued that the project was much needed to raise the morale of the police and provide them with “21st century training.” The conception of the project, as well as two-thirds of its funding ($60 million), is coming from donations from the capitalists, funneled through the Atlanta Police Foundation (APF) and the Atlanta Committee for Progress (ACP).
The APF is a self-described non-profit organization that combines the resources and power of Atlanta capitalists, the city government, and the police into one entity. Capitalist backers of APF include Wells Fargo, JP Morgan, Amazon, Chick-fil-A, Delta Airlines, UPS, Home Depot, Inspire Brands (owner of Dunkin Donuts, Buffalo Wild Wings, Jimmy John’s, and more), Georgia State University, the CEO of the Atlanta Hawks and the State Farm Arena, Axon (formally known as Taser, producer of police equipment and weapons), and Waffle House. The majority of these companies have their headquarters in the Atlanta area.
Similarly, the ACP is a self-described “public-private partnership” that includes “more than 40 highly-engaged chief executive officers, university presidents and civic leaders who off er expertise in service to Atlanta and its future development.” The organization includes the mayor and is chaired by Alex Taylor, CEO of Cox Enterprises (based in Atlanta) which, incidentally, also owns the city’s largest newspaper, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Taylor is chairing the fundraising committee for Cop City.
In September 2021, at a final city council meeting where votes were to take place to approve the project, public commentary went on for roughly seventeen hours, with the vast majority of comments arguing to oppose the project. Nevertheless, it was approved 10-4. Bottoms, who is now a senior adviser to President Biden, argued that the city had no other option. Among those who approved it was council member Andre Dickens, now Democrat Mayor of Atlanta and member of APC who is seeing the project through.
From November 2021 onward protesters have encamped in the Weelaunee Forest, where Cop City is to be situated, continually delaying construction at the site. There has been consistent and brave resistance by the people of Atlanta, as well as solidarity actions nationally and internationally. Construction vehicles set to work on the site as well as the center’s corporate backers have been targets of the movement that has heroically combated the enemies of the people.
Meanwhile, solidarity protests were held in several other cities, including Minneapolis, Nashville, and Tuscon, which have also faced intense police repression.
Maintaining and Expanding Power
Cop City, and policing in Atlanta more broadly, represent the tendency of the reactionization of the state—namely, the increasing centralization of power in the executive branch and the expansion of the armed forces. This process is inherent under capitalism in its decaying imperialist stage. The aim of capitalists is to realize profits through its exploitation of workers. Capitalists are constantly vying to increase their profits by increasing exploitation and reducing the cost of production. By increasingly centralizing their power and merging it with the government, they are able to combine the repressive apparatus (the state with its laws, police and military force, prisons, etc.) with the economy so that disruptions to the economic process—the process of realizing profits—will be met with state repression. It serves to consolidate the power of the capitalist class over the working class so that it can be subjugated, increasingly important as the imperialist economic crisis of overproduction develops.
In Atlanta, this process of centralization and repression can be seen in the increasing cooperation between these forces, with their differences less and less noticeable: the Republican governor, Democrat mayors, the capitalist interests invested in APF and ACP, and the police. It is notable that the city has the highest income inequality in the US as well as the highest rate of police surveillance.
The electoral farce of the divisions between Democrats and Republicans are thrown out when it comes to defending private property and profits, with the main difference between Republican Governor Brian Kemp and Democrat Mayor Andre Dickens being their rhetoric. Both stand with the police and national guard in the repression they have so far carried out: a political assassination of activist Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, shot 57 times by the police, and over twenty domestic terrorism charges against activists, some of which have only been accused of trespassing.
Getting Out of Cop City
Atlanta was hailed as a model for policing by former President Obama in 2015. With the growing militancy of the masses, the methods of repression employed in Atlanta are likely to be used across the country. As the struggles of the people intensify and increase in unity, the state is preparing to repress them with increased force. The old lies are having less sway among the people; there is increased disillusionment with capitalism and the rotten methods we have been told will solve our problems. May 2020 showed that the people reject the peace of capitalism. This means that the state will have to increasingly rely on brute force to quash dissent as the façade of democracy under capitalism is exposed for what it is.
Progressives and revolutionaries must become more organized and militarized in the face of an increasingly centralized and militarized state. Emphasis must be placed on organizing workers and connecting the struggles for economic and political demands with the understanding that our ultimate demand is of class power: for the working class to determine its existence and develop production according to their needs rather than a handful of parasitic owners.
Targeting businesses that back Cop City has been a good direction, and the solidarity smashing of windows of known investors such as Wells Fargo has demonstrated the need for action that affects the publicity and pro ts of businesses. A leap forward would come about through organizing the workers of such businesses. Workers at Amazon, UPS, and the companies owned by Inspire Brands organizing for the end of Cop City would be the fastest way toward corporate divestment by attacking the heart of capitalism—the exploitation of workers’ labor-power.
As long as there is capitalism, there will never be a permanent end to increased police militarization, exploitation, oppression, or environmental destruction. If activists are able to mobilize enough people against any particular initiative, it will only cause a temporary setback to the capitalists, and while one project will be temporarily halted, several more will proceed in other parts of the country. The tendency toward reactionization is inexorable under capitalism—but so is the march of the people toward their liberation. The success or failure of these battles will not determine the continuation or end of capitalism; rather, they will be the battlegrounds on which the masses and their leaders gain the necessary experience in the class struggle while constructing and consolidating their militant organizations so that the future battles that do contest the existence of capitalism will be carried to their natural conclusion.
Photo: May Uprisings in Atlanta, Georgia on May 29, 2020. Elijah Nouvelage / Stringer
